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Area Selection

Protected Area Selection

Informed by public input and internal review, Our Parks and Protected Areas: A Plan for Nova Scotia represents what are considered to be the best lands for protection. Most of these areas have been selected from presented in Our Parks and Protected Areas: A Proposed Plan for Nova Scotia, using the Six Rs criteria:

Remote: large areas in a mostly natural state with few human impacts

Representative: examples of the full spectrum of Nova Scotia landscapes

Rich: productive and diverse – where plant and animal life flourish

Rare: unique or rare landscapes, plants or animals

Restoration: fill important land gaps but need time to restore from past use

Re-connection: provide important natural connections across the landscape

Land selection also considered social value – how people will use, connect and enjoy these lands – as well as potential conflicts, including uses like settlement, agriculture, roads, forestry, mining, and energy development.

Parks Designation

Our Parks and Protected Areas also includes a number of changes to the existing provincial park properties. These changes include expanding, creating, and reassigning a number of parks. Overall, these changes add to the protected land base and better serve core park mandates of protection, recreation, education, and tourism.

Changes to the existing parks properties are based on several criteria;

Whether or not an existing property contributes to the core mandates of protection, recreation, education, and tourism

Whether another government department, level of government, non-governmental organization, is better suited to managing a particular property

Enhancing the management of an existing property through boundary revisions